If I Make It to the Morning

Dispatches from the Cancer Centre, one year later

The Sunday Letter #32

One year ago today, I finished radiation therapy for the second time in my life.

In 2019, I learned that the angry red bumps boiling beneath the skin of my arm were in fact symptoms of a mutation called lymphoma. I underwent three weeks of radiation on the campus where I was attending university, ducking in and out of my classes to run across the street for daily treatment. I was cautioned to look out for further symptoms (night sweats, sudden weight loss, fatigue) and sent on my way.

When the cancer returned last year, I knew it was back well before any tests confirmed it. I could tell just by the angry itch in my calf, the phantom bump that would appear and disappear underneath my skin, as though sensing my desperation for proof and wilting at my touch to spite me. Both the cancer and its ensuing treatment were relatively mild, but I was haunted by the fact that cancer had traversed through me. That it had known me, however briefly. 

When I returned for treatment last fall, I felt just as destabilized as before. I knew the radiation was about to leave me depleted, so I started to blast Morning Elvis by Florence + the Machine every morning on my way to the clinic. A triumphant anthem for Women In Despair, the song became my constant cancer companion, offering a brief respite from the land of the ill. 

What follows are journal excerpts from this time last year, when I was in the thick of my second round of treatment. I’d initially intended to interview other patients in the waiting room and call it Dispatches from the Cancer Centre, but instead found myself quietly observing the people around me and writing short reflections in my phone while I waited between appointments. There’s some mention here of disordered eating, mental health issues, and death. Please know that I’ve gone through treatment and I’m doing much better now than I was when I wrote it. Thank you for reading, see you on the other side.

“If I don't survive the night, if I make it to the morning, I shoulda come with a warning. And if I make it to the stage, I'll show you what it means to be saved.”

[Fall, 2022]

I start sleeping for most of the day to avoid living with myself. I recognize the taste of hunger on my tongue and I welcome its distraction. In the midst of a panic attack I sense that I’ve stepped too close to the edge of the cliff. I understand, for a split second, why someone might jump. I sense that I’m tasting something dangerous. 

Family members compliment my weight loss with a repulsive mix of both jealousy and admiration. I know I’ll gain the weight back and the compliments will be replaced with whispers about whether I’m pregnant. I wonder how much of myself I can make disappear, and which feelings would disappear along with it. 

I worry about every bump, every chunk I might have to have removed. In the end it’s just us, our bumps, our chunks, and our scars, the things that end us, that give and take life. I begin to think every tumor might be self-induced. My mind and my body, sunken to the darkest place. I thought everything on the outside must match what’s on the inside; that is, something must be rotten.

A middle aged couple in the cancer waiting room: 

Her: It's just nerves. 

Him: Huh? No it’s not, enough of that crap. I ate too much and now I got a stomach ache. No, it’s not “nerves.”

The last time I was in this exam room I was on my stomach, ascending in pain as the doctor chiseled an enormous needle into my bone marrow. This new doctor? He’s a toucher. He keeps touching my shoulder and I just laugh as his hand lingers. But when he needs to check my groin for lumps he becomes nervous. He looks away as I unbuckle my pants and it feels almost tender.

The first time I had radiation it was in my arm, too close to my womb. The doctor made me promise not to get pregnant for at least a year. I was 23. Now I’m 27. This time, I have a different doctor. I ask him whether I should be concerned about the radiation causing any fertility issues for me long term. He doesn’t know. He seemed perplexed that I’d even ask. 

An older couple is sitting next to me in the waiting room and she’s complaining about the wait time and her husband whispers that when she’s done her treatment he’ll buy her a new ring. She giggles and teases, “Oh! Now why would you do that.” She also doesn’t turn it down. 

Another older woman passes me, steadfast on her walker, flanked by her husband and son on each arm, each seeming desperate for her support. I wonder which of them is the cancer patient. I sense intuitively it’s her. 

When I snapped out of my trance at work just now I had no clue how many times I’d read the sentence on the screen in front of me. “It wasn’t a conflict that caused this battlement to come to ruin, in fact…” the words hung incomplete above the password entry box. 

I heard that a friend of a friend was having her problematic forearm tattoo removed. I don’t remember what the tattoo was, exactly. But she went to a shady clinic and her flesh went into necrosis after one visit. It was bubbling, it had turned black, you could nearly see bone. Sometimes I imagined that was what I might deserve too.  

My first time getting treatment coincided with my dad’s prolonged hospital stays in the year leading up to his death. I spent a lot of time that year walking from class to the cancer centre to the hospital where my dad stayed and my mom worked; it was all the same place. This place I’ve always hoped to flee.

Audre Lorde calls the hospital “an erotically blank environment.” There’s one continuous loop of tunnels that leads from my dad’s room in the ICU to the cancer ward. I can traverse the entire path without ever going outside. 

The hospital felt like home for a bit, all of us back under one roof again. One day I was walking to the cafeteria and I saw a newspaper with my dad’s face on it for the philanthropy award he’d just won. I brought it back to his room and he laughed before insisting we take a selfie together to send to my siblings. I didn’t know why; I’m the only one smiling in it. 

I watch this YouTube influencer who just had a double mastectomy. In one video, two nurses gently pull her hair back into a cold wrap to protect it from the side effects of chemotherapy. I feel pathetic for being this disturbed by my own treatment when this is what this woman has to endure, with a young son at home. Her eyes are closed and although it’s probably one of the worst days of her life she’s smiling slightly, as though surrendering to the momentary bliss of being caressed by two women at once. It looks like a holy moment and I’m sorry, very sorry, for intruding.

The camera in the radiation room starts to follow me around after the nurses leave the room. Once they’re safely behind the divider, they start to administer the treatment. I’m more alone than I’ve ever felt. At this point, no one can stay.

Audre Lorde, who underwent brutal treatments for breast cancer in the 1970’s, writes:

The status of untouchable is a very unreal and lonely one, although it does keep everyone at arm’s length, and protects as it insulates. But you can die of that specialness, of the cold, the isolation.

Treatment day 4: the radiation doesn’t feel like anything but I am unsettled by my hot breath below my mask as I lay face down in surrender. A baby cries in the hall while their toddler sibling receives treatment. Their pretty young mom is holding the baby; dazed, she stares into the distance just above my head.

Overheard in the store just now: a young boy crying, “mumma, it’s too heavy for me.” Here my notes just say: Foreshadowing.

I’ve been waiting for an hour to get in to see my doctor and the older couple behind me is getting restless. “Excuse me,” he says to a passing doctor, “we’ve been here an hour.” The doctor says he’ll be with him soon. The wife quips at her husband, “did you think that’d make a difference?” 

Audre Lorde writes: “The only answer to death is the heat and confusion of living; the only dependable warmth is the warmth of the blood. I can feel my own beating even now.”

As a child I was afraid of tornados, but my mother told me tornadoes didn’t go through cities so we would always be safe. My dad’s main question, always: how much time do I have left? But his doctors refused to answer. 

I used to panic about staying in the same place, about never leaving my hometown. The cancer centre is on the same campus as the hospital where I was born. The same campus I attended. The campus where my mother has worked my entire life. The campus where my dad would drive us every day to pick her up after work. Why, then, have I always tried to flee?

One day all I wrote was:

Today the waiting room is nearly

Full; but completely quiet.

By now I can tell when it’s someone’s first time here. They come in with someone else, they look lost and nervous. Today a handsome, sun-tanned man in his mid-fifties dropped off his wife at the front of the clinic and gave her a kiss before spinning around to drive off, leaving her to walk in alone. Another woman pushed her son’s wheelchair up and down the path in front of the clinic as they lifted their faces to the sky to feel the brisk autumn breeze.

Maybe staying in one place isn’t so bad either. Every day I drive to the dog park, taking the backroad where my parents had their first home, where I lived for a year as a baby before we moved into the city. I see the trees as they turn red, then yellow, then fall away completely. I imagine it all through his eyes, his artist’s eyes. I fear the day where I will have lost him for longer than I had him. What if I lose the part of him that guides my eye, too? 

A kind-looking woman in her late forties with a short grey bob gets to ring the bell today. Her friend is there to record it and they jump together in joy. I look away as they both start to cry.

Another mom in this store is chastising her son: “See, this is why I never let you hold anything. You always just drop and break it.” 

Taped to the back of the exam room door is a drug advertisement showing a woman my age corralling a herd of kids: I was tired. I hurt all the time. Now I have the energy to do the things that matter.

I’m here too early today and the receptionist calls the radiation nurses to ask: “Is Ortho warmed up?” Ortho is my laser, and I’m the only one who needs it this early in the day. I lay down beside a machine labeled “WARNING: HAZARDOUS VOLTAGE INSIDE, MUST BE A TRAINED PROFESSIONAL TO OPERATE.” The treatment takes less than ten minutes and sometimes I’m in and out while others sit waiting still, and it fills me with shame.

I watch a video about orthovoltage radiotherapy made by the company which makes the machine. It ends with the patient smiling and text saying  “And now she can join her daughter for lunch!” 

On the last day, I’m invited to ring the bell. For weeks, I’d been staring at it from afar and dreaming of ringing it, yet I’d never allowed myself to look too closely at it. The bell, I finally see, is affixed to a plaque with the name of a 5-year old girl and a cancer that I do not know how to pronounce. The people around me clap as I ring it, smiling up at me blankly. I feel like I’m cheating them all by leaving today. I am so overwhelmed that I don’t look back at the nurses, I just start to run. 

My mom had taken a video of me ringing the bell and if I watch it in slow-motion I can see myself deflate. 

Am I in remission? Have I remissed? 

I google how to be comfortable with death and dying. “Imagine you have three months to live,” is one death doula’s suggestion for confronting one’s own mortality. She also says to start thinking about your legacy and what you want to leave behind in the world. I think, Isn’t that why I wanted to be a writer? 

Sometimes during my visits to his hospital room near the end he would just sleep, so I’d work on his eulogy, knowing the only thing I could ever give was my words.

The radiation leaves a burn the size of an areola. The biopsy scar at its centre has puckered and it looks like an inverted nipple. It looks obscene, like I’ve developed a third breast, left bare for the world to see.

I think of loneliness, I think of my dad arriving in this country alone. He left his homeland as a political exile when he was the age that I am now. I wonder if I have the strength for any of this; but it’s his blood that’s in me. 

I know we’re not supposed to use war metaphors to describe having cancer but sometimes it feels like mustering up every part of you; how else to describe that but war? 

Eventually there came a time when I realized I’d been measuring time in days without catastrophe. I couldn’t stop picking at the dead skin on my lips, tearing into them until a bloody pool formed. The problem is, I’ve been doing this my whole life. I know that when it starts to grow back, that’s when it’s the easiest to pick, but then the wound never really heals. My husband has been instructed to stop me from picking at all costs. I’m unable to fight the impulse; I crave the moment of serenity that I feel before the blood starts up again. 

A friend of a friend lost her mom at 20 and didn’t get up off the floor for five years. After that, it took a religious conversion and an exorcism to stand up again. Is that loneliness? 

If this is loneliness, what did my father feel when he arrived in Canada, cold and alone, with no family and no common tongue with the strangers that greeted him?

By then, I’d become convinced that the lesions were self-induced, tumors of my ill-will. My mind and my body, sunken to that darkest place, caused the bumps to grow.

In the throws of it, I wrote: “I think the people around me can sense that I’m desperate for love and that’s why they abandon me.” When I say my father and I are connected by a single, bloody vein, I mean this: he begged me not to leave him, said, “What if I die while you’re gone?” He couldn’t be alone: materially, pathologically. Alone, he was transported back to the concentration camp, back to prison. Why eat, why breathe? What if I die while you’re gone.

“Ca fait longtemps” is one of my favourite French phrases. It means, “It’s been a long time.” But really, directly, faire, the root verb of present tense fait means to do, not to be. It means it’s been a long time, but the phrase, to me, always literally meant, “time has been made long.” But really, it means time has been taken. 

My therapist already knew my dad was dead when I walked into the room because she’d seen it on the news the night before. 

I read an interview with a photographer named Diane Severin Nguyen who said, “a successful image happens right before everything falls apart.”

Audre Lorde writes, “Survival is only part of the task. The other part is teaching.” 

“Oh, you know I'm still afraid. I'm still crazy and I'm still scared. But if I make it to the stage, I'll show you what it means to be spared.”

[Fall, 2023]

Lately the biopsy scar on my neck has been aching and the aching tastes like metal in my mouth. I’ve been rubbing the scar raw trying to remind myself the pain isn’t real.

This morning I met a shy dog named Maya. Maya’s owner told me that she’d put Maya’s sister down yesterday, and that Maya was feeling uneasy without her more outgoing sister. We commiserated for a moment—stranger to stranger, woman to woman—about death and how there’s never enough time and how dogs are magic and how we can only hope that at their end they believe their lives had been long and beautiful. I wished Maya and her human well and I left. 

The radiation burn on my leg has been aching again too. The nurse calling for my annual cancer screening tells me that it shouldn’t still be itching like this one year after treatment. She tells me to book in for another biopsy with my dermatologist to rule out determine whether the cancer has returned for a third time.

I don’t tell her: I recognize this angry ache. I’ve been recalling that hunger has a taste. In the depths of it, it can start to taste delicious.